


The Sharpest Lives

by HenryMercury



Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Gen, Heaven, Memories, Pre-Slash, Rare Pairings, Supernatural: Post-season 5, Teen Wolf: Post-3x23, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1395868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heaven isn’t what Allison had expected it to be. In particular, she never guessed that it might involve a blonde stranger sharpening knives in the corner of her bedroom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sharpest Lives

**Author's Note:**

> I realise that there's probably zero audience for this story, but I was thinking about all the awesome female characters my favourite TV shows have killed off before their time, and then I was unable to escape from the idea that I had to write these two meeting. So if you have somehow found your way here, I hope you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed making it happen.

It all happens too quickly to really comprehend—one minute Allison’s firing off arrows in an attempt to keep her friends from being killed, the next she’s telling Scott she loves him, trying to get everything across to him with a mouth that feels increasingly like it isn’t her own. There’s an old man in a dark suit that nobody else seems to see, and then she’s standing outside her body. The man tells her he’s a reaper, and she goes with him.

-

Heaven isn’t what Allison had expected it to be. It’s not that she’s ever been particularly religious, not that she was even certain there was an afterlife—but whenever she did think about it, she assumed it would involve seeing her mother again, being able to make up for their lack of a proper goodbye.

What she never expected was a blonde stranger sharpening knives in the corner of her bedroom. It’s her old bedroom, from one of the towns before she arrived in Beacon Hills. She’d had no real friends here, after rumours that she was older because she’d dropped out due to pregnancy had been circulated by the cheerleading captain, Tracy Woods. Allison may have let slip that she thought girls being directed towards cheerleading while the boys played actual competitive sports was ridiculous and unfair, and that the cheer team should at least compete in championships in their own right if they wanted to be taken seriously. Tracy had disagreed.

The girl is sprawled out over Allison’s old blue bed covers, her hands working to hone the edge of the blade like they don’t have to think about it. Allison’s more than familiar with the motion herself.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I’m Jo,” says the girl. “Mind explaining what we’re doing here?”

Allison’s about to ask her the same question when the door opens and her mom walks in.

“Allison?” she says, “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

Allison’s mouth goes dry, catches on the words. “Mom?” she gets out eventually. “It is really—”

Her mom doesn’t seem to hear her, though. “Your father has been offered a new job in Florida, and we’ve decided that taking it would be the best thing for this family,” she says, just the way she had done back when Allison had lived this scene. Usually she’d hated all the moving around, but this time it had been an immense relief. The hope of a fresh start had felt like heaven.

Which must be why she’s reliving it now.

“She can’t hear you. It’s just a memory,” Jo explains, sounding bored. The sharp scrape of metal continues.

Allison’s mom leaves, and then she and Jo are left sitting in Allison’s old bedroom.

“Why are we in my memories?” she asks.

Jo shrugs. “Beats me. I was happily reliving my own ones until I got zapped here and you showed up. Ash says only soul mates share heaven, so there must be some kind of administrative error.”

She swings her legs off the bed and then she’s standing up close to Allison, knife held in a way that might appear unthreatening to someone unaccustomed to wielding knives. Allison recognises the defensive posture, though.

She raises her hands, a gesture to indicate she doesn’t want any trouble. She’s still got her ring daggers and her lock picks in her pockets, every piece of weaponry she was wearing on her when she died—but she doesn’t want to start a fight by whipping them out. She doesn’t know whether potentially being stabbed would hurt her now that she’s dead, but it’s still a little too soon after the last time.

“You got a name?” Jo asks.

“Allison.”

“How old are you, Allison?”

“Eighteen.”

Jo laughs a little, mirthlessly. “Jeez,” she says. “And I thought I bit it young. How’d you die?”

“A demon,” Allison says after a moment. It’s easier to explain than she’d thought it would be, only having happened... or, well, she’s not sure exactly how time moves when it comes to dying and the afterlife. But she’s only just arrived here, so it doesn’t feel like more than an hour or two ago that she fell. “One of the Oni, controlled by a Nogitsune. I ran out of arrows, it caught me off-guard and stabbed me through the stomach with its sword.”

Jo seems to appraise her. “Sounds pretty intense. Never heard of anyone running into Japanese demons or evil foxes where I was from. Didn’t hear of too many bow hunters either.”

“You’re a hunter too?”

Jo nods. “Sure.”

There’s a silence. Allison looks up at the posters on the walls, bands she hasn’t liked in years, the old Buffy one that got lost somewhere during one of her family’s moves. It seems funny that she looked up to Buffy back then, knowing what she knows now, being who she is now.

“So what about you,” she tries to start the conversation up again when Jo starts picking boredly at her pillowcase with the tip of her little blade. “How’d you die?”

“Hellhounds,” Jo says, and Allison knows what putting on a brave face looks like—she’s done it enough times. Jo’s voice wavers almost imperceptibly over the word. Allison knows better than to tell her she’s picked up on it. “Demon named Meg let ‘em loose on a group of us while we were hunting the devil. Bitches ripped my guts out pretty good, so in the end we made a bomb and took them down with us.”

Allison’s heard all kinds of crazy things, but never a story like that.

“The devil?” she starts. “You hunted _the_ devil?”

Jo snorts. “Yeah. Fat lot of good it did, too. Couldn’t kill the son of a bitch. But a few of us died trying. Where are you from anyways, that you didn’t notice the apocalypse was happening?”

Allison frowns. “California,” she says. “A town called Beacon Hills. I guess it’s kind of its own centre for supernatural activity. It’s gotten worse in recent times, but Satan himself never stopped by. Is the apocalypse still happening?”

“Nah,” says Jo. She gets a haunted look about her, like she’s remembering more pain, more death, so Allison doesn’t press further when Jo doesn’t elaborate.

“Do we just stay here forever?” she wonders aloud. “I mean, it’s cool coming back to my old room for a look but I don’t really want to spend eternity here.”

Jo stops shredding the edge of the pillow and jumps to her feet.

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “There’ll be a road somewhere. Or a path. I don’t know, since apparently we’re both in your heaven now and the Axis Mundi looks different to different people.” She starts foraging around in Allison’s bedside drawers, like there’ll be some kind of path in there if she just looks closely enough.

Allison follows suit and pulls her closet open. Pushing aside old hangers laden with dresses she’s outgrown or torn or stained with blood since this memory, she expects to find the wooden back of the closet, maybe some mothballs or wayward socks. She doesn’t expect the bluish electric lighting of what looks like a school corridor.

“I think I’ve found it,” she tells Jo.

“Looks about right,” the blonde girl agrees, then raises her eyebrows. “A school corridor, though? Really?”

It’s one from Beacon Hills High, a little strange in its emptiness and apparently infinite length, but it’s familiar in many more ways.

“I have good memories here,” she shrugs.

They step through the closet into the corridor, and suddenly Allison’s old room isn’t behind her anymore—just this school hallway stretching on forever in either direction.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

“I know a guy who can help us get around, figure out why we’re both stuck in here together, but it’ll take him a little while to find us. Travelling around here is kinda tricky—way too much math involved in figuring out the routes to different planes or whatever. Ash is a genius, so he’s managed to hack the angels’ system. If anyone will know what’s going on, it’s him. In the meantime... pick a door.”

Jo sweeps her hands out to indicate the classroom doors that line either side of the corridor. Allison supposes that if her closet led her here, the doors could lead her somewhere else entirely.

She strides over to the first one and pulls it open.

-

Allison doesn’t recognise this place. She searches back through the comprehensive catalogue of towns she’s been through, holidays she’s taken, but nothing comes to mind. She and Jo are standing in a strange house, the floor littered with broken junk—a toppled standing lamp with a battered olive green shade, glass shards from a broken wall mirror, splintered wood from the mangled frame of a chair. There’s something all over the floor that looks like salt.

“Aha,” Jo says softly beside her. “We’re in one of mine this time.”

“This is your heaven?” Allison asks. “What happened here?”

Jo turns to her and grins, wide and proud. “This was my first solo demon hunt. Mom said I’d only get myself killed—but I didn’t. I saved a family from a black-eyed skank _and_ I proved everybody wrong.”

Allison understands that. Suddenly when she looks around she _does_ see a kind of heaven. Going in against the odds, feeling weak because it’s expected that you’re weak—but knowing deep down that you’ve got it in you to be powerful. Pushing back until the rest of the world is forced to admit it. She smiles back at Jo to show her that she gets it.

“Is it—is it gone?” a trembling voice asks from the doorway. A middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles around her eyes steps in, looking directly at Jo. She doesn’t seem to notice Allison. She doesn’t notice Jo’s lack of a reply, either, just goes about thanking her and calling her husband and children back into the house, because it’s safe for them now.

Jo starts walking around to the house’s back door, beckoning Allison to follow her, and when they step outside they’re greeted by a two-lane highway.

“Is this the Axis Mundi too?”

Jo nods in response. “Yep—this is how I see it. Shall we?”

They wander along the road for a while. It’s kind of nice, actually. There are no cars so they’re free to go right down the middle, or to trail over to whichever side they want to. Allison thinks it’d feel immensely lonely if she were here by herself, knowing that nobody else was ever likely to pass by, but Jo keeps up some steady chatter about different hunts she’s been on, and fills the silence so completely with her presence that it just feels perfect. Allison’s mind wanders to Scott occasionally, to her dad and Isaac and Lydia and everybody she left behind, but an unnatural calm steals over her when she realises there’s nothing she can do to go back, and she doesn’t want to wish any of them here any sooner. She misses them without feeling any of the ache she associated with missing people in life; things just feel... settled. Like they are how they are and they’ll all end up here sooner or later.

Jo talks about her mother, Ellen, who tried to stop her from hunting for a long time even though she was desperate to follow in her father’s footsteps. Allison fills in the gaps with stories about her own mother, equally overprotective. Allison doesn’t agree with what her mom did, doesn’t agree that she had to die just because she’d been bitten, but in the end she’d been trying to protect her family, and Ellen had died doing much the same thing.

“Do you see your mom around here?” Allison asks.

Jo laughs. “All the damn time,” she complains, but it’s fond. “It’s easier to deal now that I have my own heaven, though. It’s like she lives next door, her and Dad. We visit each other all the time, stop in at Ash’s version of the Roadhouse and catch up.”

“Do you know how I’d be able to find my mom?”

“It’s possible that one of the doors we open will lead us to her,” Jo says. “That’s how I found mine. Otherwise, Ash can hook you up.”

As they round a bend in the road, Allison suddenly recognises the landscape. The sun is brighter in the sky than it had been a minute ago, the Beacon Hills sign sitting out the front of the school as a few other late students make their way inside.

“One of yours, I take it,” Jo gestures.

Allison nods.

“We should go inside, see where it takes us.”

They ignore the memory-people going about their preordained actions around them. Allison doesn’t wait to be welcomed or led inside, just takes the route she knows will lead her to her first class. The teacher is talking about a body that had been found in the woods, saying the police have a suspect in custody, and referring everyone’s attention to the syllabus instead. Scott and Stiles are gesturing to one another, until Scott seems surprised by something, looking around frantically. His focus settles on the window, looking out at the spot where Allison, back when this scene actually unfolded, would have been sitting talking on the phone. Telling her mom she forgot a pen—and Allison understands how he knew to lend her one now, in a way she didn’t back then.

The door swings open and the teacher who’d shown Allison in arrives, accompanied by an empty space.

“Class, this is our new student, Allison Argent,” he says. “Please do your best to make her feel welcome.”

Allison quickly slides into the seat behind Scott. He turns around, holding his pen out to her, and gives her a timid, dopey smile. Allison’s struck by a wave of nostalgia—youthful awkwardness hasn’t overtaken Scott’s face this way in a long time; he’s harder now, as they all are. He’s gained painful perspective and taken on too much responsibility, and it’s nice just to see him as the boy she first fell in love with, hair curling around his ears. She knows it won’t matter whether she responds or not, but she smiles at him anyway.

“Thanks,” she whispers.

“Wow,” Jo says from behind her, scuffing her boots against the floor. “High school romance. Who is that kid, anyway? He looks like he’d run screaming from a bunny rabbit.”

Allison barks out a laugh, looks across at Jo. “That kid? A true alpha werewolf.”

Jo’s eyebrows rise.

“Things change a lot after this memory.”

“So were you guys, y’know? When you died?”

“Were we still together? No. We’d broken up, he’d moved on and I had too, mostly. I still loved him, though—I realised that at the end. It was much simpler to see it when everything else was fading, when nothing mattered that much because I couldn’t do anything to change it. Life got in the way of me and Scott. I’ll always love him but I don’t think we’d ever have worked again the way we used to.”

“The hunter and the werewolf,” Jo muses. “Your life is a high school drama.”

Allison shrugs. “Maybe. It felt more like a horror movie most of the time. Honestly by the end I’d almost forgotten I even went to school.”

The class is carrying on around them, but there’s no use hanging around much longer. It’s clear that Allison’s mom isn’t here, and neither is the guy, Ash, that Jo keeps talking about, so they move out into the corridor, which is once again eerily empty and tinted with bluish light.

-

The next door opens into a dusty house. There are people hanging around the small space, all of them appearing tense in some way. Books crowd almost every surface in piles that Allison thinks have probably accumulated over the space of numerous years. Everyone has some sort of beer bottle or shot glass at hand, if not in hand. Some kind of latin music taps vaguely in the background.

Allison and Jo are standing beside a refrigerator when a man sidles up to them. He’s quite tall and well-built, with a grey-green shirt open over a black tee. His face is very symmetrical, the bone structure delicate in comparison to the way he holds the rest of himself. Allison might find it attractive if only the expression on it looked halfway genuine. As is, the man looks like he hasn’t let a thing he really feels show on his face in years.

“So,” he says with a leer in Jo’s direction, “dangerous mission tomorrow. Guess it’s time to, y’know, eat drink and _make merry_.”

Allison doesn’t know what exactly Jo did when she lived this out, but right now she’s watching him like he’s the best entertainment she’s ever had.

“What?” says the man, in response to something the scene’s original Jo must have said. “No, no,” he chuckles awkwardly. Then he pauses. “If I was, would ah... would that work?”

Jo leans up close to him, and he matches her movement in a way that suggests they did it this way the first time around. His face in her hands, she tells him,

“No. Sweetheart if this is our last night on earth then I’m going to spend it with a little thing I call self-respect.”

The guy fidgets, looks at least slightly ashamed.

“If you’re into that kind of thing,” he says, and Allison gets the impression that he himself is not.

“Who is he?” Allison asks.

“Dean,” Jo answers. “Dean Winchester. World class idiot.” She says it all with her gaze fixed on him, like maybe part of her regrets turning him down. “This actually was my last night on earth, you know. I have to wonder whether maybe self-respect was overrated given the circumstances.”

“Did you like him?—Want him?”

Jo nods, looking a little wistful. “Yeah,” she says. “I think so. I definitely thought I did.”

“Then why couldn’t being with him and self-respect happen at the same time?” Allison asks.

“He’s just...” she trails off. “You and I think our lives were complicated—and they were—but this guy... he was a hot mess _before_ he spent four decades in hell. With all the shit that’s happened since then, I don’t know how he’s still walking. Most of the time it’s pretty goddamn clear that he doesn’t either, and isn’t even sure why he should want to be. There’s so much that’s broken under there, the amount of trust and faith he’d have to put in someone to let them in would be phenomenal. And that person was never gonna be me. So yeah, the alternative isn’t so compatible with self-respect.”

The memory’s occupants are gathering around the corner in the other room. One of the men, an older one in a wheelchair, is grumbling about having something to remember everyone by, while the others protest that they don’t want pictures taken. A low, grave voice cuts in, tells them very seriously that this, the night before they hunt the devil, will indeed be their last night on earth.

It’s so bittersweet—especially knowing, as Allison does, that the party won’t make it home whole. Jo looks like she’s torn between running towards the warmth that exists here, this little pocket of almost-calm before the storm, and running away. Allison reaches out to take her hand, and Jo allows her to thread her fingers through her own.

They walk this way along the corridor they discover when Allison opens the fridge.

They walk into Allison’s practise firing range in the woods of Beacon Hills. Arrows pierce the paper targets and stick out of tree trunks, each one either dead on or very close to the centre. Her aim has improved since this memory, but it was a landmark at the time. Things had been hard, and out of control, but not this. This was Allison’s strength, her certainty, and in this moment the world had fallen away and she had felt so sure.

“Nice work,” Jo looks approvingly at one of the perfect bullseyes.

“Thanks,” Allison says, smiling across at her.

She and Jo keep wandering through the forest to a new stretch of road. Jo doesn’t drop Allison’s hand, and Allison keeps her grip tight and sure. Warmth from Jo’s hand bleeds right through Allison—but nothing is all that hot or cold in heaven. Temperatures are muted. This warmth is another kind; a rightness, something like friendship—but something more than that, too. She can’t place it, hasn’t felt it before. Doesn’t ever want to stop feeling it.

“I’m glad I got to meet you,” she tells Jo.

“Yeah, me too. Kinda wish I’d met you back on earth. Would’ve been nice to have somebody who got what I was feeling, what I was looking to do.”

“Maybe we would have met?” Allison suggests. “You could easily have come to Beacon Hills on a hunt one day. Or I could have moved away when I went to college, or something, run into you that way.”

“It’s possible. We didn’t exactly have all that long down there.”

Jo’s words when she’s first arrived suddenly stand out Allison’s mind, make her wonder. Only soul mates share heaven, she had said. Allison doesn’t want to mess things up by trying to move too fast or make too many assumptions, but it certainly feels like a possibility to Allison that she and Jo were meant to cross paths eventually. Destined. Designed.

It’s possible.

“Do you think maybe this is something from the futures we’d have had?” she says carefully. “That us meeting is something that would have happened if we’d had fuller lives, and that’s why our heavens are combined? Because we do know each other—or we would have?

“Back in the memory in my old classroom, I heard things that I was never there to hear. I was outside, while the teacher talked about the body in the woods. But you and I both experienced it, like these memories aren’t just a reconstruction of what we’ve actually seen, but something more omniscient. Maybe us meeting is like that.” Allison pauses, wonders if she’s reading too far into it all. “I understand if you want to have your own heaven back, once we find Ash and he can figure out how to fix things—but for what it’s worth, I don’t know that this is something that needs to be fixed. I wouldn’t mind the company.”

Jo’s quiet for a long moment.

“You wouldn’t rather wait for Scott’s company?” she asks, her tone an overly schooled neutral.

And for all the dreams Allison had had of being with Scott forever, she can’t imagine being here with him. The memories of what they used to be will remain favourites, and she’ll cherish them each time she walks into one, but there were reasons they broke up, reasons they just didn’t fit together the right way any longer. Scott will hopefully grow up and grow old and have a family—and Allison wants those things for him, but she won’t be a part of them. She could wait for him, sure, but she already knows that she’d do so only to watch him share heaven with somebody else—the person he’ll spend most of his life with, not just a few of his teenage years.

Like the absence of her grief, there’s no jealousy left in her over that now.

“I don’t think so, no,” she tells Jo simply, truthfully.

Jo seems to light up at that, and Allison realises that she’s used to not being people’s first choice. Allison can’t imagine why, other than that she’d been around the wrong people all her life, people like Dean who saw her without really _seeing_.

“Then sure, I guess I’d be fine with extending this little arrangement,” Jo says, and she sounds nonchalant, but Allison knows she wouldn’t say a word she doesn’t mean. “You’ll have to watch out for my mom, though,” she goes on to warn. “She has guns.”

Allison’s grin grows sharp. “That’s okay,” she says, drawing her ring daggers out of her pockets at last. “I have these.”

“Okay, no, you’ll be fine,” Jo decides, taking one of them and turning it over with evident admiration. “She’s gonna love you just as much as I do.”


End file.
